Little noted but of major interest: At last months Microsoft MVP Global Summit, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie spoke about how he approaches his role as leader software technology steward at Microsoft. The session provided an inside view of how this famed technologist operates. Read more »

Microsoft has abandoned its effort to purchase Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Yahoo vigorously rebuffed the offer, first launched in February. In announcing the withdrawn offer, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer disclosed that the company had increased its initial bid.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” Ballmer said in a statement.

This deal would have moved Microsoft far deeper into a Web Advertising market in which it has trailed both Google and Yahoo. Viewers suggest it well could have shifted the company’s emphasis away from its successful software businesses.

It is not completely certain that the merger machinations are wholly over - as Ballmer’s comments point primarily to pricing as the obstacle to completing the deal. Both Microsoft and Yahoo in the wake of this clumsy dance of courtship.

Some comment from the blogosphere:

According to Stephen Bainbridge. Big shareholders wanted a deal, “but not one that required Microsoft to overpay. In addition, press reports suggest that some of Microsoft’s largest shareholders were pressuring the firm not to overpay.”

Andrew Brust says it’s not over ‘til it’s over. “Microsoft’s withdrawal of its Yahoo acquisition proposal may just be a negotiating tactic.  Or it could in earnest.  Time will tell.”

And, the crack blogger MiniMicrosoft chimes in as well. “With this strategic inflection point, the era of post-BillG Microsoft 2.0 has begun.”

Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad of Strangeloop recently presented strategies to improve scaling in the ASP.NET environment. They look at some performance forumlae, and look at the challenging issues in measuring each performance element.

“The ASP.NET techniques that work effectively for 10,000 simultaneous users aren’t as effective with 100,000 users, and the rules change again with 1 million users,” they write in an MSDN article.

Among the many tips they impart: Always test your caching code for these complex scenarios.

Microsoft’s recent discussion of mesh computing raises a few questions. For some details on what it is, go to the LiveMesh pages. The company has rattled about a lot of ‘Live” initatives, but this may be the first one with legs. Now, we are going to drop the mesh term immediately, and start to use ‘Cloud’ to describe whatever it is Ray Ozzie has been concocting - it is a more widely used term. Just think of it as a Grid on steroids, or rather a subset of a Grid on steroids.

Now the questions.

Who will the Microsoft Cloud effect? Seems like consumers are the target. It appears for now a way to connect one’s different electronic files and such. It may sneak into the enterprise, of course, just like Lotus 1-2-3 did.

Will it work? The answer there is yes, it will work about as well as most software; meaning, it will work much of the time, but you will come to curse it on occasion. Does IT have higher standards than individuals do on the question ‘does it work?’ - well, that is an open question.

Who is the competition? Basically, it is the nemesis called Google. Google has its own Cloud computing solution a’brewing, and Microsoft will have to meet the Valley Search Wizards of Googledom on that plain of battle because…well, because that’s what they are supposed to do. This is not mano on mano, no. It is geek-o on geek-o.

Of course, a wild card in the Cloud race is Yahoo. As you may recall, Microsoft is courting Yahoo with all the ardor of a CPA romancing a distant society deb. It is hard to guess how that will play out, but there is much about Yahoo that Microsoft will have to come to grips with. Yahoo has its own Cloud computing initiative - it has a lot of computers sitting around down on the farm, you know - which, like a lot of things at Yahoo, does not exactly work the same way as the Microsoft cloud alternative. As Blogster Par Excellance Mary Jo Foley points out, meshing these two platforms could be a real mess. Well put, Foley!

A whole new thing called ‘Web 2.0′ has arisen along with the AJAX phoenix. AJAX can improve responsiveness of networked applications by getting the client to do more work. But the first request from and the first download to the client-side cache can incur a dramatic performance hit.

Microsoft Research boffins have been cogitating on this, and have produce a PDF paper discussing Doloto, a system that analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications.

Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with the Web application much sooner, without waiting for the code that implements extra, unused features, using the Doloto framework, the team writes.